Study: Online traffic will triple by 2018

That’s one of many findings in a new forecast from Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, which predicts internet trends for the looming half-decade.

The company says that global IP traffic has increased by more than five times in the past five years, and will increase threefold over the next five. Between 2013 and 2018 the annual compound growth rate of internet traffic will be 21 percent.

Put another way, global internet traffic in 2018 will be 64 times the volume of worldwide internet traffic in 2005. Internet traffic will hit 14 gigabytes (GB) per capita in 2018, compared to 5 GB in 2013.

The majority of internet traffic, 55 percent, will come from content delivery networks by 2018, while 57 percent of traffic will come from non-PC devices.

Video traffic will account for 79 percent of all consumer internet traffic in 2018, up from 66 percent last year. By 2018 the amount of video-on-demand internet traffic will be the equivalent of 6 billion DVDs per month.